Excellent put-downs
about famous women
She was incredibly ugly, uglier than almost anyone I had ever met.
A thin, withered creature, she sat hunched in her chair, in her
heavy tweed suit and her thick lisle stockings, impregnable and
indifferent. She had a huge nose, a dark mustache, and her dark-dyed
hair was combed into absurd bangs over her forehead.
- - - Otto Friedrich (about Alice B. Toklas)
Face to face confrontations
between famous women
I have more talent in my smallest fart than you have in your entire
body.
- - - Walter Matthau (to Barbra Streisand)
I loathe you. You revolt me stewing in your consumption . . . you
are a loathsome reptile - I hope you die.
- - - D. H. Lawrence (to Katherine Mansfield)
Insults about famous
actresses
 Zsa
Zsa Gabor
She has discovered the secret of perpetual middle age.
- - - Oscar Levant (about Zsa Zsa Gabor)
She not only worships the golden calf, she barbecues it for lunch.
- - - Oscar Levant (about Zsa Zsa Gabor)
The only person who ever left the Iron Curtain wearing it.
- - - Oscar Levant (about Zsa Zsa Gabor)
You can calculate Zsa Zsa Gabor's age by the rings on her fingers.
- - - Bob Hope
Zsa Zsa Gabor has been married so many times she has rice marks
on her face.
- - - Henny Youngman
Katherine
Hepburn
She has a face that belongs to the sea and the wind, with large
rocking-horse nostrils and teeth that you just know bite an apple
every day.
- - - Cecil Beaton (about Katherine Hepburn)
She ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B.
- - - Dorothy Parker (about Katherine Hepburn)
Marilyn
Monroe
Her body has gone to her head.
- - - Barbara Stanwyck (about Marilyn Monroe)
She has breasts of granite and a mind like a Gruyere cheese.
- - - Billy Wilder (about Marilyn Monroe)
She's a vacuum with nipples.
- - - Otto Preminger (about Marilyn Monroe)
Elizabeth
Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor looks like two small boys fighting underneath
a thick blanket.
- - - Mr. Blackwell
Elizabeth Taylor's so fat, she puts mayonnaise on aspirin.
- - - Joan Rivers
Every minute this broad spends outside of bed is a waste of time.
- - - Michael Todd (about Elizabeth Taylor)
Other
Actresses
Her hair lounges on her shoulders like an anesthetized cocker
spaniel.
- - - Henry Allen (about Lauren Bacall, 1994)
A buxom milkmaid reminiscent of a cow wearing a girdle, and both
have the same amount of acting talent.
- - - Mr. Blackwell (about Brigitte Bardot, 1962)
She's like an apple turnover that got crushed in a grocery bag
on a hot day.
- - - Camille Paglia (about Drew Barrymore)
She speaks five languages and can't act in any of them.
- - - John Gielgud (about Ingrid Bergman)
A great actress, from the waist down.
- - - Dame Margaret Kendal (about Sarah Bernhardt)
She looks like she combs her hair with an eggbeater.
- - - Louella Parsons (about Joan Collins)
Joan always cries a lot. Her tear ducts must be close to her bladder.
- - - Bette Davis (about Joan Crawford)
A kind of cross between Julia Roberts and Jack Nicholson.
- - - Jeremy Novick (about Lolita Davidovich, Modern Review, 1994)
She turned down the role of Helen Keller because she couldn't remember
the lines. - - - Joan Rivers (about Bo Derek)
A woman whose face looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone
had licked it.
- - - George Bernard Shaw (about Isadora Duncan)
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite sameness.
- - - David Shipman (about Marlene Dietrich)
The worst and most homeliest thing to hit the screens since Liza
Minelli.
- - - John Simon (about Shelley Duvall)
Hah! I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy!
- - - Ava Gardner (about Mia Farrow's marriage to Frank Sinatra)
Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe it's the intellect.
No, it's the hair.
- - - Tom Shales (about Farrah Fawcett)
Jane Fonda coming back to the screen after a decade-and-a-half
absence in Monster-in-Law is like Brando returning from the
dead to star in a Police Academy movie.
- - - Michael Sragow
Purists, be warned: This scare-flick quickie [House of Wax]
has as much relation to the 1953 Vincent Price classic with the
same title as Paris Hilton does to acting.
- - - Peter Travers
Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater.
- - - Bette Davis (about Jayne Mansfield)
Miss United Dairies herself.
- - - David Niven (about Jayne Mansfield)
The Russians love Brooke Shields because her eyebrows remind them
of Leonid Brezhnev.
- - - Robin Williams
It's a new low for actresses when you have to wonder what's between
her ears instead of her legs.
- - - Katherine Hepburn (about Sharon Stone)
Whatever it was that this actress never had, she still hasn't got
it.
- - - Bosley Crowther (about Loretta Young)
Insults about
famous athletes
Martina was so far in the closet she was in danger of being a garment
bag.
- - - Rita Mae Brown (about Martina Navratilova)
Insults about famous
comics
Roseanne Barr is a bowling ball looking for an alley.
- - - Mr. Blackwell
The closest thing to Roseanne Barr's singing the national anthem
was my cat being neutered.
- - - Johnny Carson
She is as much fun as barbed wire.
- - -Tom Hutchinson (about Sandra Bernhard)
I treasure every moment that I do not see her.
- - - Oscar Levant (about Phyllis Diller)
When it comes to acting, Joan Rivers has the range of a wart.
- - - Stewart Klein
Insults about
famous musicians
Madonna
Armed with a wiggle and a Minnie Mouse squawk, she is coarse and
charmless.
- - - Sheila Johnson (about Madonna, 1987)
I look at my friendship with her as like having a gall stone. You
deal with it, there is pain, and then you pass it. That's all I
have to say about Schmadonna.
- - - Sandra Bernhard (about Madonna)
Not in this lifetime. Why? Because I'm the only one she hasn't
done it to.
- - - Sharon Stone (when told Madonna has said she wants to kiss
her)
She is closer to organized prostitution than anything else.
- - - Morrissey (about Madonna, 1986)
She is so hairy, when she lifted up her arm, I thought it was Tina
Turner in her armpit.
- - - Joan Rivers (about Madonna)
Other
Musicians
Mariah the fashion pariah ... the queen of catastrophic kitsch
- - - Mr Blackwell (about Mariah Carey)
I didn't know her well, but after watching her in action I didn't
want to know her well.
- - - Joan Crawford (about Judy Garland)
She aught to be arrested for loitering in front of an orchestra.
- - - Bette Midler (about Helen Reddy)
A cross between an aardvark and an albino rat.
- - - John Simon (about Barbra Streisand)
All legs and hair with a mouth that could swallow the whole stadium
and the hot-dog stand.
- - - Laura Lee Davies (about Tina Turner)
Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.
- - - Ralph Novak (about Yoko Ono)
If I found her floating in my pool, I'd punish my dog.
- - - Joan Rivers (about Yoko Ono)
Insults about
famous politicians
A senescent bimbo with a lust for home furnishings.
- - - Barbara Ehrenreich (about Nancy Reagan)
Attila the Hen.
- - - Clement Freud (about Margaret Thatcher)
Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she
came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.
- - - George Bernard Shaw (about Queen Victoria)
In feathered hats that were once the rage, she resembles a petrified
parakeet from the Jurassic age. A royal wreck
- - - Mr. Blackwell (about Camilla Parker-Bowles)
Insults about famous
writers
She preserved to the age of fifty-six that contempt for ideas which
is normal among boys and girls of fifteen.
- - - Odell Shepherd (about Louisa May Alcott)
A fungus of pendulous shape.
- - - Alice James (about George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans)
George Eliot has the heart of Sappho; but the face, with the long
proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed
animality.
- - - George Meredith (about George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann
Evans)
Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."
- - - Mary McCarthy (about Lillian Hellman)
She bellies up to the gourmet cracker-barrel and delivers laid-back
wisdom with the serenity of a down-home Buddha who has discovered
that stool softeners really work.
- - - Florence King (about Molly Ivins)
To those she did not like . . . she was a stiletto made of sugar.
- - - John Mason Brown (about Dorothy Parker)
Isn't she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping,
plagiarizing, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary
publicist as ever.
- - - Dylan Thomas (about Dame Edith Sitwell)
I am fairly unrepentant about her poetry. I really think that
three quarters of it is gibberish. However, I must crush down these
thoughts, otherwise the dove of peace will shit on me.
- - - Noel Coward (about Dame Edith Sitwell)
In her last days, she resembled a spoiled pear.
- - - Gore Vidal (about Gertrude Stein)
She was a master at making nothing happen very slowly.
- - - Clifton Fadiman (about Gertrude Stein)
Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I
believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
- - - Dame Edith Sitwell (about Virginia Woolf)
She needs open-heart surgery, and they should go in through her
feet.
- - - Julie Andrews (about columnist Joyce Haber)
Insults about miscellaneous
notable women
She was divinely, hysterically, insanely malevolent.
- - - Bette Davis (about Theda Bara)
She looks like something that would eat its young.
- - - Dorothy Parker (about Dame Edith Evans)
She is a lady short on looks, absolutely deprived of any dress
sense, has a figure like a Jurassic monster . . . very greedy when
it comes to loot, no tact and wants to upstage everyone else.
- - - Sir Nicholas Fairbairn (about Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess
of York)
Timid? As timid as a buzz saw
- - - George Ells (about Hedda Hopper)
She must use Novocain lipstick.
- - - Jack Paar (about Dorothy Kilgallen)
Monica Lewinsky has agreed to host a new Fox reality show called
Mr. Personality. Lewinsky says this way, when people ask her the
most degrading thing she's ever done, she'll have a new answer.
- - - Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live
No woman of our time has gone further with less mental equipment.
- - - Clifton Fadiman (about Clare Booth Luce)
She looked like a huge ball of fur on two well-developed legs.
- - - Nancy Mitford (about Princess Margaret, 1959)
She's about as feminine as a sidewalk drill.
- - - Maryon Allen (about Phyllis Schlafly
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